


Memoriae

by Fox_Populi, SuperiorDimwit



Category: Ao no Exorcist | Blue Exorcist
Genre: Doodles, Ficlet, History, Mephisto has been around for a long time right, Mythology - Freeform, So That's What This Is, and there's lots of myths I want to place him in
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-10-08
Updated: 2020-10-08
Packaged: 2021-03-07 21:00:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,534
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26894083
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fox_Populi/pseuds/Fox_Populi, https://archiveofourown.org/users/SuperiorDimwit/pseuds/SuperiorDimwit
Summary: Samael has been around for a long,longtime, under names given by humans in different cultures and different ages. Those humans are long gone. But for Samael the memories remain.
Relationships: Mephisto Pheles/various mythological or historical characters I suppose
Comments: 7
Kudos: 16





	Memoriae

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _They were old hands at the art of crafting. At the art of deceit. At the art of bringing gods and humans to their knees._

Humans will always have their gods, because humans will always have needs. If they need shelter above their heads, they will pray the gods for it. If they need food in their bellies, they will pray the gods for it. Whenever they are lonely and desperate, they will pray. Some gods will respond. Some will make humans regret they prayed at all. But it is when immortal plays immortal that truly wondrous games unfold, for gods are not above praying other gods for aid when desperation lights that final bridge aflame.

Lemnos had been an island of flame, once. Only the rocks remembered that time, when a humble population of fishermen had carried torches across the island in honour of the god that first tamed fire. The crippled one had a temper, and sacrifices were warranted to keep the god within the mountain from scorching the island with his wrath.

It might have surprised those humans that the mountain didn’t erupt when the god was angered but when he was happy.

It would definitely have surprised them to see a pink umbrella wobble its leisurely way across the barren landscape.

The Mediterranean sun was not sympathetic to tailcoat and stockings: Samael was, and the sun could mind its own business. The King of Time was not one for pilgrimages but he knew better than to test the patience of the gods when he came to – not pray, strictly speaking. Samael didn’t _pray_. He made suggestions. Very good ones and with a reasonable amount of counterfeit humility. It was that humility aspect, foremost, that saw him travelling on foot across the billowing ochre of this island shaped by flame.

Shrubs had slowly conquered it for the past centuries, small and prickly and stubborn in their quest to reclaim what their ancestors had lost. The past doesn’t allow itself to be obliterated quite so easily, however, and history kept its silent monuments on display amongst the greenery: here, the earth heaving like the swell of a frozen river; and here, a field of giant molten baubles, first attempts they made at the baoding balls Samael and his brother later perfected; indeed, Lemnos was a sanctuary worthy of the man who seized destruction in his hands and harnessed it for creation.

“Greetings, lord of the forge! Hermes comes to commission you another masterpiece of mischief!” Samael folded the umbrella with a flourish as he entered the mountaintop cave. “No need to be like that,” he chided good-naturedly at the echo of his own voice. He strode deeper into the darkness, and it receded obediently into the corners. “You’ll like it, Hephaestus – have I ever been wrong? It will be a double-bluff – nay, a _triple_ -bluff!” Samael gestured animatedly as he skipped and danced through the forge like a nymph at the Bacchanalian revelries. “Three gods fooled, two gods slain, and one who stands a world of fun to gain~”

He passed the mountainous rows of hammers coated in dust, the anvil, the quenching trough – Hephaestus had kept meticulous order in his workplace, a paragon for all artisans – the arms-thick chain of the bellows rod, the pile of coal, the… furnace.

The hearth was the heart of the home, so the human saying went. It was where warmth and food and company were had, the place where gods received their daily offerings: destroy their earthly forms in flame, and the smoke will carry them to the realm beyond.

The hearth had its own god, too – and what a human thing it was, what a wonderfully human thing to give her first sacrifice of all! Before the gods that pulled the sun across the sky, before the gods that coaxed life up from the soil, to give this diminutive goddess the honour of being first greeted, first served, and never let the fire of her temple dwindle!

Indeed, if the hearth was the heart of the home, the furnace was the soul of the forge.

Samael stood before the black maw and its silence. There had not been hearth gods since the fall of Rome, and the mountain that once breathed fire now slumbered. The hammer strikes no longer shook the seas, and no torch bearers journeyed across the island in honour of the man who subdued the raging flame.

The sound when Samael cleared his throat seemed monstrously loud.

“I really have to do everything myself, is that it?” Almost immediately, a dismayed look pulled at the tips of Samael’s ears. “I did help. Inspiration is helping.” The furnace swallowed his words and gave none back. “You’re an awful conversationalist, you know that? There’s _art_ to this, steps and turns – one can’t just bludgeon conversation with a hammer till it takes the shape you want.”

He raised his fingers to snap, but stopped. Indeed, he may have been as blunt as a hammer, but Hephaestus had certainly understood art. A god of fire, yes, but above that a god of art. And art is not created at a mere snap of one’s fingers.

“No.” The furnace met his glare steadily, patiently. It had waited centuries for him to pay visit: it could wait centuries more for him to pay respects. “You can’t be serious.” Samael's voice rose a few notches.

The furnace was, in fact, dead serious.

“If so, what of my compensation?” The furnace, to what extent furnaces can, glared back. “You may be the god of art but I am the god of trade – and if there is any exchange of services on the table, that is most definitely a matter of trade,” Samael smiled sweetly. Instead of snapping his fingers, he tugged his gloves off, one finger at a time – until he flinched and almost tore the glove in half. “What do you mean _dis_ service? I’m a master smith, too, you know!”

Samael let the empty furnace ponder its misdeeds and approached the centre of the forge. He eyed the heavy chain of the bellows rod as one would eye a tavern table with a particularly nasty sheen of grime on it. Hephaestus had understood art, but he could also be heinously dismissive of it.

“Wordsmithing is not an art, you say? Even if my creations cut as well as any sword and deflect as well as any armour? I’m all words and no action to you?” They had had that argument a hundred times over a hundred centuries. But this time was different. This time, there was a faint glow in his eyes, and a curve to his lips that tasted victory already. He flicked one of his gloves lazily back and forth, the motion of a cat about to pounce. “Throwing the proverbial glove, Hephaestus dear.”

Gods do not trade in man-made coin. It is practical to have, if one wishes to partake in the games an economy subjects its victims to, but when immortal bargains with immortal a different sort of currency must be offered.

To work a fire is to manage a most unruly pet. It must be fed, but not too much, and it must be kept in its cage, but all the while agitated to escape it. Bellows would suffice for heating any other furnace, but no other furnace could have given birth to Helios’s chariot or Athena’s Aegis. There was art to forging miracles, steps and turns a pilgrim come to pay respects must honour.

Hephaestus had employed cyclopes in his time, to work the heavy bellows rod that punched through the bones of the mountain all the way down to the fiery pit of its gut. There wasn’t much else one could do with cyclopes, although Samael had suggested Hephaestus could use their heads as anvils if he ever wore out his own. The bellows rod still buried in the rocky floor, a pillar of stone whose girth took four men combined to embrace. The chain that girdled it to the pulleys above allowed length enough for three cyclopes to pull at once, and three cyclopes was what it had taken to lift it and drop it back down.

“You’d laugh if you saw me now, I’m sure.”

Samael gathered the chain and braced his feet, frowning at the absurdity of the situation. He pulled with both hands, to the sound of stone grating drowsily against stone. He released, and the mountain shook beneath his feet.

“You always laughed when I proposed a new idea for a prank.”

Pull, release: the earth groaned and bucked in protest.

“You called me insane.” A smirk touched his lips as he gathered the chain again. “And then you crafted me exactly what I needed.”

Pull, release: sparks chased up the furnace gorge, a breath of heat blowing through the forge as the underworld hissed awake. A triumphant little laugh bounced out of him as he went to shovel more coal into the glowing bed before the pit.

He cast one glance on the heavy, smeared leather apron on its hook beside the furnace and concluded: “There _are_ limits.”

Samael snapped his fingers for an apron his size. And style.

* * *

_There are no shortcuts in craft._

It had been Hephaestus’ favourite thing to say, especially whenever Samael suggested that something could be done with magic. Magic was quicker, not to mention cleaner. It was also an argument the limping god simply smiled at. Never contradicted, just smiled. He had been infuriating that way.

 _Some_ form of magic had to be involved in craft. A smug, obscure kind of magic that rang with laughter every time the hammer struck a blow on the ridiculous slab of metal that refused to take shape.

“Not a _word_ , Hephaestus. Not that that was ever a problem with you,” he gritted out when the steel bar once again split in half beneath the chisel when he merely wanted to dent it. It would have to be coated in clay slurry again, re-heated, and fused back together. Samael hated it with a passion.

He had made himself Hephaestus’ personal muse of misconduct for a reason. The big, stocky Nephilim may have been a half-breed, and so malformed his own mother had thrown him into the sea to perish, but when he put his hammer and tongs to work he was fully, rapturously _divine_ – or human, perhaps. Creation had never been the domain of demons. But no human had ever been able to do what he did either. Perhaps it was in that liminal space, through the hands of those born of both worlds, that true miracles could be worked.

Perhaps – perhaps not. Some things are unknown even to the gods.

Hephaestus would have called him insane, yes. He would have laughed. And then he would have helped the King of Time make his triple-bluff bet.

Samael had never struck the metal, nor fanned the flames, but many are the roads that lead to Rome and many are the ways to work dissent and disarray. He had brought the gossip fresh from the Olympian heights, the nuts and bolts of divine intrigue in which Hephaestus’ creations were the vehicle and his own well-forged words would provide the push that sent it on the road to ruin. He had breathed the spark of inspiration into the blacksmith’s ear, stoked the fire of vengeance in his heart, and together they had set the world ablaze and laughed.

They had made a throne, beautiful as can be: a seat fit for a goddess. It was a testament to the lack of imagination among demons, that Hera had sat on that throne without considering that a gift from her rejected son might be veiled deceit. And sat she had, for she stuck to it like a barnacle to the hull of a ship, and no god on Olympus had been able to free her. _I have no mother;_ those had been Hephaestus’ words when they had eventually come crawling to ask him to release her. He hadn’t. Let them plead and curse and beg, the god who had been tempered in sea and flame would not bend. Dionysus had to get the blacksmith well and truly drunk, and escort him to Olympus like a king returning home from conquest, before he could be persuaded to unbind the goddess.

“You were _glorious_.” The words curled around his teeth like wisps of fragrant incense. Some memories have that quality, to stir what slumbers in the pit of the still mountain: a texture of silk and intoxication, elating like alcohol and flammable, too. It brought a glow to Samael’s eyes like the glow of the steel fresh out of the furnace, soft and hot with promises of what it would forge.

His eyes were the only glow in the cave by the time the memory faded. The flame had died down to embers around the steel bar, the air gasping for somebody to work the bellows; the lump of metal on the anvil still its formless, ugly self. Samael’s face pulled a disgusted grimace as he left the hammer and the tongs. Soot on his apron, on his skin, in his _hair_ – yes, he had made himself a muse of misconduct _for a reason_.

But when immortal bargains with immortal a different sort of currency must be offered. Something personal. Something impassioned. Something to shake the ground and make the gods cry out with glee. Or with frustration.

Pull, release. Curse Hephaestus and rot his bones, he could _at least_ have trained some of his children to take over after him!

Pull, release. Curse his children, too – none of them had shown the same spirit for mischief and rebellion. Even if they _had_ possessed the skill their father had, they wouldn’t have been half the accomplices he had been.

“There hasn’t been anyone like you since you died,” Samael muttered when he gripped the chain for the third time. “I looked.” He pulled hard, and the bellows rod struck the ceiling of the cave with a pained crunch.

The shirt clung to his back like wet seaweed when he moved. Physical labour was an insult, both to his office and to his host, and while the two couldn’t agree on who was most insulted his body was the most verbal about it. It did every loathsome thing a human body can do to express displeasure, but eventually the fire flared in the furnace again. Samael’s silhouette cast a giant, quivering phantom across the cavern walls, and pulled a wry, knowing smirk to his lips as he returned to the anvil. He saw the way his features distorted on the rock and the tool racks, the outlines of his ears and his beard lengthened to sharp, jagged points among dancing flames. Indeed, with the soot smudging his skin – he looked the part.

“Really, Hephaestus. You’re making a terribly unflattering caricature out of me.”

Humans will always have their gods. And their devils. Both created in the crucible of awe, forged from needs of different kinds. The image of a devil in a pit of flame had evolved from the men and women who burnt brittle iron into finest steel: a metamorphosis of the elements that seemed impossible, or, for lack of better word, _supernatural_. And while only one blacksmith in all of history had been commissioned by the devil, many more had been put to death under accusation of practising the dark arts.

“Should I get one of those naked dwarf statues, perhaps?” he smirked when he heaped coals on the steel bar and watched it flush from red to yellow. “Leave it here in your stead?” The furnace crackled a swarm of sparks at him. Samael chuckled. “I’d like to see you try.”

* * *

_Build it to last._

If you set your mind on making something, make it real. Put time and effort into what you craft and make it last the wear of a hundred years. It had been a central tenet in Hephaestus’ philosophy, and in everything he did.

It had also been a cornerstone in his argument that wordsmithing was not an artisan skill. Used once and gone forever, what worthwhile skill was there in words? Even when repeated to stay in memory, over and over until every sense of meaning had left them, words would still metamorphose treacherously between transmissions.

Hephaestus had, in the bluntest manner possible, declared that words would accomplish little more than briefly decorating the air with opinions. To the god of oration and storytelling.

Samael had argued against that stance while they crafted the throne for Hera. He had made some _excellent_ points about the longevity of words when they were working on the bow and arrow for Eros, a god who may have had little to do with wordsmithing personally but had done great favours for the art. They had debated the embossing of Achilles’ armour parallel with the boy’s prospects of immortality, and had Hephaestus been alive in present time Samael would have stuffed _The Iliad_ down his throat along with every lengthy foreword ever to be published with it.

Words may not last, but they mould eternity.

Like steel, Hephaestus had been unyielding. Like rock, he had stood rigid in the torrent of examples and clever illustrations Samael had tried to persuade him with. Like the utter bastard he was, stubbornness was the one virtue he shared with Samael.

The King of Time glared morosely at the steel, at the red fading to black faster than he could hammer it into shape. Sweat dripped from the tip of his nose and sizzled a single flare of sulphur blue on the metal. The forge was sweltering hot, and still the metal cooled so very quickly. Samael had never been good at being bored – few demons were, but for one who embodies the very _essence_ of change the never-ending repetition of heating the steel in the furnace was _the_ most boring thing he had ever had to do.

…He didn’t _have_ to do it.

“It’s not cheating,” he defended with a look of affront. “I’ve done similar before, remember? Requested by you, if you recall. The only time my breath was ever useful,” Samael huffed, and gathered strands of himself he rarely used. They wound together in his chest, in his throat, wrapped the base of his tongue in the gritty, tickling sensation of metamorphosing. It was not shapeshifting so much as shapeshedding, a coiling and uncoiling of his physical form that sent indulgent ripples through his spine. Samael opened his mouth. And exhaled.

Steel needs 1300 degrees Celsius to be made glowing and malleable. Hephaestus had been able to tell at a glance when the temperature was right; Samael had no such proficiency, but he could tell by sensation when the flame of his breath was hot enough.

That was the only thing Samael had ever contributed to Hephaestus’ work.

Prometheus had not stolen fire from the gods. The poor Nephilim boy had not stolen at all, but that was a well-kept secret Samael had shared with Hephaestus one evening when they had resolved to empty every last amphora on Lemnos; the god of the burning mountain was not the only one with scores to settle on Olympus. What Samael had given to Prometheus had been infinitely more destructive than fire: it was one thing for humans to create their gods, but if they knew how to kill them that would shift the balance forever.

The first time a demon had been exorcised – permanently: _eradicated_ – Gehenna had shaken in its foundations. The rules of the game had changed, and not in their favour. But the relation of their realms had always been one of harmony, of giving and taking, and so the King of Light demanded scales be balanced: Samael had proposed how.

The forge master of Lemnos had called him insane. And had devoted himself day and night to forging a masterpiece that would last a hundred years and more.

“If we measure by longevity,” Samael smiled through the sheen of sweat, hammering the steel into its final shape at long last, “Pandora was our greatest work.”

Pandora was their greatest work measured by any standard. She was _perfect_. She was Hera falling victim to her pride, she was Achilles succumbing to his cruel destiny, and she was the thirst for knowledge that would bring mankind salvation and doom joined as one. Most of all, she was theirs. And nobody had taken a moment to question that.

Hephaestus gave her shape; Athena had given her knowledge of the crafts, Aphrodite the art of making oneself pleasing. Zeus gave her the pithos, a large, sealed urn, with instructions never to open it. Samael had breathed life into her. He had given her a voice so sweet with cunning innocence that she could charm any man without ever realising it, and a mind too curious to be ashamed of disobedience. The last thing he gave her was her name: Pandora, the All-Giving, sent to bestow all the gods’ gifts upon the unsuspecting humans.

They had suffered greatly from the calamities that pithos unleashed. But it is when immortal plays immortal that truly wondrous games unfold, and while the humans had suffered they had also learnt from it. Grown from it. They had learnt to dig deep into despair for that spark of hope at the bottom; that flame, however small, that would light their way through the darkness. They had applied the knowledge Prometheus had given them, perfected it, and in doing so they had tipped the scales back in their favour in spite of everything.

Once again, nobody had taken a moment to consider how eager certain tricksters were to set the world ablaze and laugh. Would they fall for it a third time? Perhaps – perhaps not.

“Now this will be our greatest work.” Samael eyed the layered steel, its inner core and outer mantle. “If all goes right.”

Joining two as one is never easy – joining opposites is worse, but perfection hides in the tangent where they touch. The steel core alone would be too soft to form an edge, would have no resistance to offer an opposing force; the hard mantle was too brittle on its own, too stubbornly unbending, and would shatter upon impact like a wave thrown against the rocky shore. It had to be soft _and_ hard, flexible _and_ rigid, and if the crucial step of joining layers failed it all would be in vain.

“Flexible and rigid,” Samael murmured, watching the pieces before him and the pieces that had been laid out before him throughout the ages, through laughter and arguments and trickster wiles that set the world aflame. One flexible, one rigid. Soft and hard, words and action, and the chaotic perfection where the two joined hands.

“I surrender! I surrender, Hephaestus! You are the master smith between us! Hah!” he laughed, backed by a chorus of laughter bounding off the cavern walls. Build it to last, yes. Make it real, build it to withstand the wear of a hundred years and more. As they had always done. “Yes, I’ll be the words to your action!” he shouted, wiping away the sweat stinging his eyes. “And you the force behind my will! Only with the two combined can tides be turned, and towards the future spill!”

Beneath his feet, the mountain shook a throaty rumble the world hadn’t heard since the fall of Rome.

“Oh now you care to join, do you? Was it the flattery or the fear that I will botch the fusing?” Laughing, glowing, he thrust the layered steel into the furnace where fire had begun to claw towards the top of the mountain. “It’s only fitting that we do this together,” he grinned, sparks and shadows dancing madly over his form. “The subtotal of everything we’ve done. The beginning of the end.” He lifted the steel out of the flames, as white-hot as a new-born star.

Words would not be enough. Neither would steel; he had tried both. He had tried both in turns but if he tried both at once, both in unison, he might be able to forge a future that wasn’t smouldering in blue flame.

Samael drove the beat of the hammer like war drums through the mountain veins, a steady, hypnotising rhythm like the chants of islanders long dead. The ground shook, the walls shook, and the tools rattled in their sockets, but all his strikes landed true. As they would have, if it had been Hephaestus guiding the hammer. Samael worked feverishly, like an artisan does, like artisans always had when inspiration seized their minds and drove them past the needs and complaints of the body. The steel bar thinned, lengthened, fused solid in the glowing shape of a blade, and he was quite certain that that was not entirely his own accomplishment. Inspiration, the humans called it. The breath of the gods inflaming the mortal spirit to work wonders; a beautiful image indeed, and while it was not literally gods taking hold of the human mind, the similarity between creativity and possession was certainly there.

Humans had their gods, and their devils. And the forge was where they shared common ground.

Early blacksmiths knew nothing of carbon, oxygen, or temperature requirements: if they forged swords of steel instead of iron, it was entirely by accident. But those few swords became legends of their own. Superior in strength and sharpness, humans passed them down in generations. They were revered – and named. Named, because humanity did not understand the full ramifications of what that meant. Of what they truly forged.

In their minds, the swords were inhabited by divine spirits and should be treated as such.

Samael quenched the blade in water, to the hiss of vapour and the first groaning convulsions of an eruption. His own fire fizzled, too. To create is to make passionate love on that bed of hot coals; the aftermath gave his limbs over to the aches and tremors of a body that had toiled beyond its means. His mind, however. His mind glowed every shade of hell as the sword came out of the water, black and glistening. It would have to be polished to a shine. It would need to be sharpened, and fitted with a grip to allow for wielding it.

It is a long process, the making of a weapon. There can be no shortcuts, no parts rushed when honing it to perfection.

Samael tested the balance of the blade, admiring how the steel caught the flash of fire through black grime. Opposites joined by the flame of the divine. A glimpse into that shifting otherspace where, perhaps, miracles could still be worked. Where the final battle had just begun. He smiled, and it curled around his lips like wisps of fragrant incense. Some visions of the future have that quality – elating like alcohol and intoxicating, oh yes, stirring what slumbers in the pit of the mountain and making it roar.

Samael did not roar. He whispered, hushed and heavy, as if into the ear of a lover: “It’s time we put calamity back in the pithos, you and I.”

For the first time in centuries, the volcano of Lemnos erupted.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This has been lying around for a while and I just haven't gotten around to putting it up? This chapter isn't exactly what I envisioned when I had the idea to make Memoriae but a spontaneous amalgamation of 1) Fox Populi and I running high and low with AnE and mythology as usual, and 2) Gothic Morrighan making art of Mephisto in a forge with the sword-to-be on the anvil. xD The art hasn’t been completed as I write this but I’ll link to it when I can.
> 
>  **Lemnos** is a Greek island. The volcano hasn’t been active in a long, long time but it’s one of the islands closely related to the myth of Hephaestus and his forge.
> 
>  **The baoding balls** I mention are from chapter 82 of _The End of the Beginning: Inferno_. It’s one of many magical artefacts I’ve created for Samael to play with but it won’t be anything you need to take into consideration for this chapter. Just that there are spherical rock formations on Lemnos that I also have headcanons for. xD
> 
>  **Hermes** is one of Samael’s old aliases in my headcanon. There’s just so much about him that fits.
> 
>  **Hestia** is the goddess of the forge. Eh. That’s all, really. I’m not letting her feature here much. ^_^’
> 
>  **Greek myths, Greek myths,** come get your daily dose of Greek myths about Hephaestus~ I dunno if there’s anything to add, I summed the myths up pretty okay in the fic I think. Hephaestus made just about every magical doodad that circulates in Greek myths. He was sometimes depicted as a naked dwarf, similar to how Norse mythology also depicts master blacksmiths as dwarves. I figure old friends like Heph & Meph (isn’t it a wonderful title?) would mess with each other to no end about how humans picture they look.
> 
> In **the mandatory Dimwittian history-and-anecdotes corner** we find curiosities such as the Medieval belief that blacksmiths were in league with the forces of darkness because they could use fire to “work magic” on metals. It’s not entirely established that the classic Christian devil image has drawn inspiration from the blacksmith and the forge but the accusations of black magic are documented. The origin of naming weapons and venerating them as magical/spiritual comes from plain old human ignorance back when the Hittites invented blacksmithing 3500 years ago.
> 
>  **Fire-breathing Mephisto?** Aaaah well it’s a headcanon for me and Fox Populi that he’d be dragon-like in his demon form? For many reasons that I am too lazy to list. x’P
> 
>  **Prometheus** – in the manga Mephisto did give humans knowledge of how to fight demons, with an imagery that is very reminiscent of how other mythological figures have given humans the forbidden treasures of the gods. So I just went with that and the general symbolism of fire.
> 
>  **Inspiration** – c. 1300, "immediate influence of God or a god," of Latin inspirare "blow into, breathe upon," figuratively "inspire, excite, inflame," from in- "in" + spirare "to breathe". I saw a TED-talk about that long ago and it’s been at the back of my mind ever since. How humans have always believed that creativity and passion in creation was something channeled from the realm of the divine. It spoke to me because it feels exactly like that when an idea enters you and you have no choice but to be its wet-nurse and birth it through whatever medium you work with.
> 
>  **Katou being awesome again.** The forging process I took from a document on the making of traditional katanas. Which happens to work as a beautiful metaphor for this fic and for AnE. I mean, I think the world of Katou as a writer. She’s super nerdy about her work. Katanas are staple weapons in manga/anime so at face value it’s just that, but the process of making one? The actual combining of opposites, of properties that negate each other and must be ever-so-meticulously joined or you end up with useless junk? Given to Rin to contain the heart of his being? Katou is an example to us all, truly.


End file.
